Louis Davidson

Every project I am on, there seems to be a common argument. The project manager is pushing to get done faster, and we software producers are pushing back for more “quality” time. Shouldn’t managers have more empathy for what we development-DBA types suffer in pursuit of high-quality data? Every cry of “how much longer is […]

It’s Friday afternoon, and the lead DBA, a very talented guy, is getting ready to head out for two well-earned weeks of vacation, with his family, when this error message pops up in his inbox: Msg 211, Level 23, State 51, Line 1. Possible schema corruption. Run DBCC CHECKCATALOG. His heart sinks. It’s ten…no eight…minutes […]

“Do one thing every day that scares you” – Eleanor Roosevelt Laudable as these sentiments are, inspirational even, most DBAs are likely to treat them with a customary degree of caution and circumspection. The DBA profession isn’t necessarily one we associate with a love of danger and keen sense of adventure. Many DBAs protect vehemently […]

SQL Server offers very simple interfaces to many of its features. Most people could open up SSMS, connect to a server, write a simple query and see the results. Even several of the core DBA tasks are deceptively straightforward. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform a basic database backup or run a trace […]

So, clearly there were a few unrealistic parts of this blog. First, I don’t own a tuxedo. I wore one to a wedding 20 years ago, but that was rented. I don’t even own a suit coat that I would wear. I telecommute and the only thing proper about the way I dress for work […]

“When I was younger, I dreamt of being an astronaut…” “When I was younger, I dreamt of being a doctor …” “When I was younger, I dreamt of being a DBA…” Eh? What was that last one again? No, you didn’t, not really. Perhaps you dreamt of creating a new piece of software to help […]

It was not long ago that the hats that people wore at work signified their roles in society. Two people wearing similar clothes with two styles of hats might have vastly different jobs in the business hierarchy. It is still the case with firemen, the police and the military that you can discern much about a […]

“You see, Watson,” he explained in the early hours of the morning as we sat over a cup of tea in Baker Street, “it was perfectly obvious from the first that the explanation for this query’s sudden poor performance was elementary”. “But how could you guess what the cause was?“ “Firstly, we see that the […]

One day, you are sitting at your desk, minding your own business. Your DBA colleague walks up and exasperatedly tells you that there is a query running 5 hours every day, and that the code is simply awful. After just a few hours of refactoring and tuning, the code could be repaired, blazingly fast, and […]

One morning, you wake up and feel funny. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something isn’t quite right. What now? Unless you happen to be a hypochondriac, you likely drag yourself out of bed, get on with the day and gather more “evidence”. You check your symptoms over the next few days; […]